Recent events in Afghanistan, as
well as the continuing difficulties of Christians in
Iran, Indonesia, Algeria, Pakistan and the Sudan,
have returned the topic of Islamic militancy to
Western newspapers. Concern for the situation of
world Christianity requires of Catholics some grasp,
however non-specialist, of where such militancy
comes from and whither it is going. The 1994 Roman
Synod of the Catholic churches of Africa was much
exercised by the problem, though to judge from the
reported speeches of the bishops, few had more to
recommend than "dialogue" – that
contemporary Vaticanesque panacea. To understand why
the revolutionary Islam characteristic of a major
segment of the Muslim world in the late twentieth
century aims at nothing less than the comprehensive
take-over of the civil societies where Islam is
present, one sine qua non is an acquaintance, at
least in broad outline, with the origins and
development of the Islamic faith as a whole.

Islam was born in the Arabian
peninsula among Bedouin Arabs tribal in social
structure, polytheistic in religion. Unwritten laws
of tribal authority and custom governed Bedouin
society. In what has been called "tribal
humanism", the virtues and rules it inculcated
for guiding human behaviour were ascribed to no
divine source but functioned, rather, as the
distillation of tribal experience and tradition. In
pre-Islamic Arabia, the threat of group vengeance
underpinned a rudimentary practice of justice,
unenlightened by much sense of moral responsibility,
whether personal or communal. No eschatology of
post-mortem reward or punishment appears to have
been known. The religion of Arabia, indeed,
reflected its society. The many gods and goddesses
served as protectors of individual tribes, their
spirits associated with such sacred objects as
trees, stones, springs and wells. At Mecca, the most
important oasis town, a cube-shaped building, the
Kaba, was regarded as the central shrine of these
tribal patron deities, three hundred and sixty of
whom were venerated collectively at a great annual
pilgrimage-cum-fair.

The pre-Muslim inhabitants of
Arabia also knew of a supreme high God, Allah, whose
name means "the God". The creator and
sustainer of life, he was, however, remote from
everyday customs and the object of neither cult nor
ritual. Three goddesses, believed to be his
daughters, were associated with him. Arabian
religion was quite definitely, then, a polytheism,
though in both the far north and the extreme south
of the peninsula could be found Arabs who were, by
contrast, monotheists, whether in unitarian guise,
as Jews, or in trinitarian form, as Christians.

It is important to note that, at
the time Mohammed was born – c. 570 A.D. – this
tribal society, with its religion, was experiencing
a painful straining of its internal cohesion. This
was the consequence of the fast accelerating
transformation of the Bedouin Arabs from a nomadic
into a sedentary people, and the resultant emergence
of such cities as (precisely) Mecca. New wealth, the
rise of a commercial oligarchy and more marked
differentiation into social classes: all this began
to undermine the traditional system of Arab tribal
values, and the way of life, and social security,
they afforded. From the beginning – and in sharp
contradistinction to Christianity in this regard –
Islam regarded itself as a divinely inspired
provision not only of new religious and ethical
truth but also of a new social and political order.

Who, then, was Mohammed? He was
the son of a trader, orphaned at the age of six, but
rising to become the steward or business manager for
the caravans of a wealthy widow, whom he later
married. He appears to have enjoyed a reputation for
good judgment and trustworthiness, qualities
complemented by a reflective nature that lead him to
retreat at intervals to a cave, some miles north of
Mecca, where, in long periods of solitude, he
contemplated his life and the ills of society,
seeking greater insight. Here in the month of
Ramadan, 610, on an evening Muslims call "The
Night of Power and Excellence", Mohammed
received the first of numerous allegedly divine
revelations. A heavenly intermediary, later
identified as the angel Gabriel, commanded him to
"recite". Mohammed replied that he had
nothing to recite. But finally, after repeated
bewildered pleadings, the words came to him:

Recite in the name of your Lord who has
created,
Created man out of a germ cell —
Recite for your Lord is the Most Generous One
who has taught by the pen,
Taught man what he did not know!

The messages continued over
twenty-two years until 632, and were subsequently
collected and written down (Mohammed himself being
illiterate) in the Koran, whose name means "The
Recitation". At first Mohammed was reluctant to
make known these "revelations". He feared
that the messenger might be demonic, and he himself
rejected as one possessed – the starting point of
Salman Rushdie’s novel about Islamic origins, The
Satanic Verses.

Such fears were not unfounded
for, to begin with, Mohammed’s mission met with
fierce resistance. Why? First of all, his
denunciation of polytheism and his insistence that
Allah was the only God, with whom no other could be
associated, both upset the traditional beliefs of
his hearers, and threatened the lucrative pilgrimage
centre at Mecca where he was living. Secondly, his
message included a rhetoric favouring "social
justice". His anathematizations of usury, of
the exploitation of orphans and widows, and of the
neglect, on the part of the rich, of obligations to
the poor, did not endear Mohammed to the ruling
élites. But thirdly, and most importantly, Mohammed
claimed not only prophetic authority but also, based
on this authority, a right to political leadership.
Indeed, he insisted that all true believers belonged
by rights to a single universal community,
transcending tribal or other bonds, and submitted to
his ultimate direction.

In 622 Mohammed, still under a
cloud at Mecca, was invited to arbitrate in a
dispute between tribes at Medina, a city some two
hundred miles to the north. His journey there, or
"migration", the hijra, which the Islamic
calendar takes as its year 1, marks the
turning-point in Mohammed’s fortunes. At Medina,
Mohammed succeeded in establishing his own
leadership, thereby creating the first Islamic
community-cum-State: for this was a new religion and
a new political order rolled into one. There
Mohammed issued a charter setting up a community
whose primary identity and bonds of unity were those
of a common religious faith.

From Medina, Mohammed launched an
attack on Mecca, and in 624, at a place called Badr,
he defeated the Meccan army. Muslims regard the
Battle of Badr as endowed with a unique
significance. In the first and most decisive
encounter of the forces of Islamic monotheism with
the followers of ignorance and unbelief, God
assisted his own soldiers to victory. Throughout
subsequent history, Muslims have appealed to this
battleground as the symbol of jihad, the sacred
struggle: for example, in the Egyptian-Israeli war
of 1973, whose Egyptian code-name was
"Operation Badr".

Once in possession of Mecca,
Mohammed found it comparatively easy to consolidate
his hold on the rest of Arabia, by a combination of
military and diplomatic means. By 632, the year of
his death, this conquest – the incorporation of
the peoples of the Arabian peninsula into the
Islamic umma, or community – was complete.

Before looking at the subsequent
development of Islam, something more needs to be
said about the teaching and the religious-political
community thus established. Since Mohammed was
simultaneously prophet, ruler, military commander,
chief judge and lawgiver, not only the Koran was
authoritative for Islam. The practice of Mohammed,
his example (Sunna), had to be taken as the norm for
communal life, which it was by way of reports or
traditions (Hadith) about what the founder had done
and directed. (Many of the latter, it should be
said, are treated as legendary by Western scholars.)
The Koran and the Sunna, the Recitation and the
prophet’s Example, became the two principal
sources of the Sharia, the Law of Islam, though they
were supplemented both by appeal to the consensus of
the community, following a saying of Mohammed,
"My community will never agree on an
error", and by analogical reasoning, furnishing
as this could rules for one situation by reference
to the principles underlying the rules found in the
authoritative sources for some other situation.

The faith of this religio-political
community was a monotheism which saw itself as
essentially a purification of the two monotheistic
religions known to Mohammed himself: Judaism and
Christianity. According to Mohammed, as polytheists
the Arabs were living in ignorance of Allah, the
God, and his will, as revealed by his prophets Adam,
Abraham, Moses and Jesus. This was culpable of them,
for Arabs were descended from Abraham through Ismail,
Abraham’s son by Hagar – rather than through
Jacob, his son by Sarah, the Jacob whose other name
was Israel, the ancestor of the Jews. Mohammed
understood Islam, therefore, not as a completely new
beginning, but rather as a restoration of the true
faith by an act of total surrender or submission (islam)
to Allah, and the implementation of his will as
revealed in the last prophet – Mohammed himself.
The God who showed his hand in nature and history
also disclosed his face in the Scriptures of the Old
and New Testaments, but, unfortunately, Jews and
Christians distorted his revelation. This the Jews
did by claiming for themselves the status of a
uniquely chosen people, and the Christians by making
Jesus into the Son of God, and thus committing the
one unforgivable sin of idolatry, associating a
pseudo-God with the only true God, Allah.

Mohammed was disappointed when
Jews and Christians failed to rally to his
reformation, with its supreme Scripture, the Koran
– regarded as qualitatively superior to the Bible
in that it is the eternal, uncreated, literal Word
of God, sent down from heaven, a book pre-existent
to the creation of the world and co-existent with
God, even in its Arabic language. This supreme
Scripture reveals a God both just and merciful, and
the mission he gives to true believers to be his
servants and spread his rule.

Muslims constitute the new
community of believers who are to be an example to
other nations. As the Koran says:

We made you an umma justly
balanced, that you might be witness over against
the nations...

and again:

You are the best community
evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right and
forbidding what is wrong.

The Koran envisages a society
whose belief and action are inseparably joined, with
worship and devotion affecting private and public
life equally, and where authoritative prescriptions
lay down the fundamentals of a new social order,
including such aspects as marriage, divorce,
inheritance, theft, fornication, murder, false
contract, usury, and the hoarding of wealth.

None of this was lost on Muslims
after the death of their founder. The wars of
conquest on which Muslims embarked were regarded as
an opening of the way, fath, for Islam. The speed
with which they established their supremacy
throughout the Middle East seemed a miraculous
validation of the truth of Islam’s claims, as
Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Persia and Egypt submitted
to the Muslim advance, to be joined soon after by
other lands, extending the boundaries of the Muslim
empire to Morocco and Spain in the West, and across
central Asia to India and Indonesia in the East.
But, owing to the prophet’s rôle as not only
messenger of God but also political leader, his
death, unaccompanied as this was by any provision
for succession, faced the Islamic community with a
political crisis never fully resolved.

The longest lasting form which
the succession to Mohammed took was the Caliphate.
The Caliph, appointed at first by a process of
consultation among Mohammed’s closest disciples,
and later by hereditary right, was the head of the
community of believers. However, the appointment of
the fourth Caliph, Ali, whose supporters were called
Shiites, Shiat-u-Ali, the party of Ali, led to a
permanent cleavage within Islam. The Shiites held
that Mohammed had designated Ali (his son-in-law) as
his successor, and intended the "commander of
the faithful" to be always of Ali’s family
and line. With Ali’s murder in 661, the Shiites
established their own succession, supporting, over
against the Caliph of the main body of Muslims, now
termed Sunni, a supreme Imam or Teacher, of whom
they recognise eleven, all told. The twelfth Imam
they regard as not having died but as having been
divinely "hidden". This occluded Imam
will, they believe, return so as to organize the
final victory of Islam at the end of time.
Meanwhile, authority devolves, for Shiites, on
clerical theologians (also called imams), who
represent the teaching of the temporarily occluded
Grand Imamate in the interim: hence the present
governmental system of Iran. Both groups, the Sunni
and the Shia, agree nonetheless in regarding the
period of Mohammed and his early companions as
normative for all subsequent Muslim society, and the
necessary reference point for all Islamic revival
and reform.

Under the Caliphate, based
successively at Damascus, Baghdad and finally
Istanbul, Islamic jurisprudence developed the early
legal elements in the sources into an elaborate
structure of administrative and criminal law,
governing in principle all areas of life. The Sharia
is believed to be God’s law for all mankind,
since, in the final analysis, God is the sole
legislator for the world. To break the law is
simultaneously a crime and a sin, a transgression
against society and against God, and the guilty are
subject to punishment both in this life and the
next.

By the mid-seventeenth century,
however, not only had Islamic military and
missionary expansion come to a halt. The fabric of
the Islamic polity itself seemed to be crumbling.
The Caliphate, now held by the Ottoman sultans, was
incapable of extending its authority over the two
competing Sunni empires, that of the Moghuls in
India, and of the Safavids in Iran. Furthermore, all
three polities were undergoing a slow but steady
disintegration. In the nineteenth century, this
process speeded up as European powers, themselves
committed in various degrees to Christianity, and
given economic and technological muscle by the
Industrial Revolution, began what seemed their
inexorable encroachments on the vast global space
denominated by the later twentieth century Western
intelligentsia the "Third World".

The resultant shock to Islam,
which found itself, for the first time in history,
reduced to a position of subordination and
dependency, produced by way of reaction a
many-faceted movement of revival. The "Militant
Islam" of my title is its most striking form.
Whereas some more moderate forms of the revival –
Islamic modernism – accepted elements of Western
constitutional law and economic arrangements, the
more radical kind insisted on the uncompromising
rejection of everything that originated outside
Mohammed and the seventh century community. All
non-Islamic accretions or innovations must be
treated as corrupting infiltrations, and those
Muslim religious establishments which have given
them house and home be either purified or
overthrown. In the later twentieth century it is
this militant Islamic revivalism which is in the
ascendant in much of the Muslim world, while its
more accommodationist, modernist competitor is
widely discredited.

Why? The main reasons appear to
be twofold. First, the moderates lacked credibility
in that they could so easily be represented as
speaking for Western-educated or Western-oriented
rulers and political élites. For example, feminist
movements looked like organisations of upper-class
women who wished to discard the veil so as to adopt
Western dress and life-style. According to the
radicals, Muslims could only remain faithful by
rejecting Western secularism and materialism
outright, and returning solely to Islam, whose
perfection makes for assured guidance. For the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or the Jamaat-i-Islami,
"Islamic Society", in India, the
separation of religion from the State in Western
nations represents the inherent fallacy of
secularism, preparing the way for the disintegration
of the moral order of society.

Secondly, in the 1960s and1970s,
a variety of political factors gave the radicals
fresh influence. These would include both particular
events, like the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967-1968 and
1973, the oil embargo of 1973, the Iranian
revolution of 1978-1979, and also more general
states of affairs, like the apparent failure of
pro-Western Muslim governments to meet the
socio-economic needs of their populations, and a
renewed quest by the intelligentsia for a deeper
rooting in the Islamic past. Perhaps the most potent
events were the loss of East Jerusalem, the third
holiest city in Islam, to the Israelis, and the
Iranian revolution on which the Islamic Student
Association of Cairo University commented:

The Iranian revolution
represents the first breach in the wall of
secularism...The Islamic peoples rejected it and
began to set up the rule of God. Secularism is a
call to separate religion from the State and to
prohibit Islam from interfering in politics or
in the affairs of government. It is the
perpetual resort of those idolatrous rulers who
transgress limits set by God and paralyse his
Sharia.

Can we sum up the ideological
Weltanschauung of militant Islam? First, Islam is a
total and comprehensive way of life, covering
society, politics and law. Secondly, the renewal of
society requires an Islamic religio-political and
social revolution. Thirdly, to restore God’s rule,
Western-inspired civil codes should be replaced by
Islamic law. Fourthly, science and technology must
be subordinated to Islamic beliefs and values so as
to guard against Westernisation and secularisation.
Fifthly, those nominally Muslim governments which do
not accept these principles are illegitimate, and
their members and supporters, in effect,
unbelievers. Sixthly, struggle, jihad, against
unbelief and unbelievers is a religious duty. The
army of God is locked in holy warfare with the army
of Satan, whose vanguard is Western (mainly
American) and Eastern (mainly Russian) imperialism,
together with Zionism. Lastly, owing to the
connexions of Christians and Jews with such
imperialism and Zionism, militants may maintain that
the latter groups can no longer, as once
traditional, be treated with reverence as
"peoples of the Book", but must be suspect
as potential participants in a world-wide conspiracy
against Islam. These seven points underlie the
policies of, for instance, the radical Shiite
organisations, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, in the
Lebanese civil war.

In most Muslim States, citizens
may hold any office, regardless of their faith.
However, this Western (and, basically, secular and
liberal) approach is increasingly contested.
Non-Muslims, it is said, cannot appropriately occupy
governmental, military, judicial or legislative
positions, since these involve responsibility for
formulating an Islamic philosophy of civil society
to which, by definition, they cannot be committed.
Non-Muslims should exercise only a restricted rôle
in properly constituted Islamic society.

A Catholic Christian response to
all this would naturally involve, firstly, charity
towards all individual followers of Islam, and,
secondly, stimulated by the challenge of Islamic
militancy, a clearer perception both of how the
Christian faith agrees with Islam in some respects
(see the Declaration Nostra aetate of the Second
Vatican Council) and of how it differs, and remains
unique and transcendent (see the Decree Ad Gentes of
the Second Vatican Council). In the later patristic
and early mediaeval periods, The Parable of the
Pearl, by the Nestorian patriarch Timothy, and pope
Gregory VII’s letter to the Hammadid ruler al-Nasir,
exemplify eirenic yet doctrinally confident
attitudes to Islam. But the peculiar quality of
militant Islam is that it demands of us a response
in a particular sense: namely, in terms of a
theologically based political ethics.

It is widely believed nowadays
that Catholics were committed by the Second Vatican
Council, in its Declaration Dignitatis humanae, on
religious liberty, to what is basically that
Western, Liberal and even secular view of the
relation between religion and civil society rejected
by all Muslims save a few Westernising Islamic
modernists: namely, that the State as such has no
religious duties or competence, and that a religious
body can ask of it only the freedom to pursue a
spiritual mission as one grouping among many in the
ideological market-place. This is, in all
essentials, the nineteenth century Liberal ideal of
"a free Church in a free State". That the
present-day Catholic Church has been belatedly (at
the Council) converted to this standpoint is
generally credited by the Council’s friends and
foes alike. The belief that the historic Churches
have abandoned all aspiration to construct or
conserve "Christendom societies", and
ceased to claim a public relevance for their
religious doctrines, encourages Muslims with a
"forward" policy in Western societies to
press the counter-claims of the Islamic umma: on the
ground that, being now essentially secular, and
hence Godless, such societies are effectively
spiritual and ethical vacua which Islam may one day
hope to fill.

However, even a cursory reading
of the Conciliar Declaration on Religious Liberty
shows that the Council intended to adopt no such
classical Liberalism. The preamble of the text
states clearly that:

God himself has made known to
mankind the way in which men are to serve
him...This one true religion subsists in the
Catholic and apostolic Church, to which the Lord
Jesus committed the duty of spreading it abroad
among all men.

leave untouched traditional Catholic doctrine
on the moral duty of men and societies [italics
added] toward the true religion and toward the
one Church of Christ.

The Council document goes on to
elaborate the philosophical, biblical and doctrinal
reasons why religious freedom, seen as following
from the God-given dignity of the human person,
should be recognised in the constitutional structure
of society, and thus become a civil right within
what the Declaration cautiously terms "due
limits".

Thus the Council simultaneously
maintained continuity with the traditional
understanding that there can and should be such a
thing as a Christian State, a civil society where
orthodox Christianity is the only recognized public
doctrine, yet broke fresh ground in adding to this
the very important rider that even or especially
within the legal structure of such a Christendom
society space must be created for dissenting groups
who do not accept the validity of the Judaeo-Christian
revelation in its Catholic (or perhaps any) form. It
is because a liberalizing interpretation of
Dignitatis humanae has gained a false status of
self-evidence that more recently (in the Catechism
of the Catholic Church promulgated in 1992) the
magisterium has intervened to set the record
straight. There we read that decisions in and for
civil society cannot be made without at least
implicit reference to a metaphysical vision of man
and his destiny. Furthermore:

Only the divinely revealed
Religion has clearly recognized in God, the
Creator and Redeemer, the origin and destiny of
man. The Church invites political powers to
refer their judgments and decisions to this
inspiring Truth about God and Man.

The Catholic view is not so much
at the antipodes from the Islamic, then, as might at
first appear.

Simultaneously, however, Catholic
Christendom is now possessed – as unfortunately in
the Western Middle Ages it was not – of a theology
of political ethics that enables it to incorporate
civilly non-Catholic citizens, with the provision of
legal defence for the corporate patrimonies of
life-ways that reflect the diverse consciences of
persons.

It is natural that those whose
minds and sensibilities have been formed by modern
Western liberal institutions will feel that a
concerned, equitable, fraternal and therefore
hopeful response to Islamic militancy lies in
downplaying the theory, and few remaining
institutional vestiges, of Christendom, and
substituting for these the concept and practice of a
secular, pluralist society. Such an attitude is at
least as common among believing and practicing
members of the historic Churches in Britain as in
other sections of British society. Whatever
psychological plausibility it may gain from
collective guilt over colonialism and intolerance in
the past (though the historical record in these
respects is more varied than some would believe),
there is no reason to think that it cuts any ice
with such thoroughgoing Islam. Indeed, the Salman
Rushdie affair taught the contrary lesson. Muslim
militants are more amenable, and sympathetic, when
they encounter a theologically-based political
ethics (albeit one not their own), than when
presented with liberalism tout court. For the former
they can have some respect; for the latter none.
There is little that Christian minorities can do to
impede the movement of Muslim societies towards the
full implementation of a radically-conceived Islam.
But there is something Christian majorities can do
to assure such thorough-going Muslims that
acceptance of the language, and attendant practice,
of "human rights" does not necessarily go
hand in hand with Godlessness and insouciance
towards the claims of the Abrahamic revelation. In
that way, the slow reconstruction of the foundations
for Christendom societies in the West may help
defuse hostility towards an enlightened
"modernism" of Western provenance in the
Islamic world itself. Perhaps this is the real
global strategy the cruel happenings of 11 September
2001 should elicit, at least in the sense of the
only one with any chance of enduring effects.

This article was first published
in New Blackfriars and was revised to form a
chapter in the second volume of Beyond the Blue
Glass (St Austin Press, 2002). It is reproduced
with permission of author and publisher.